College Gets Tougher on Verifying Learning Disabilities of AidApplicants

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Three years ago, when it came time to choose a college, Benjamin Freedman, whose dyslexia was diagnosed when he was 14, picked Boston University because of the support services it offered for students with learning disabilities.

"It was supposed to be the cream of the crop," said Mr. Freedman, now a junior with a 3.1 grade average. "Everyone I talked to said that Loring Brinckerhoff, the director of the Learning Disabled Support Services office, was highly regarded."

Then, in December, Mr. Freedman and hundreds of other learning-disabled students at the university received a letter that shocked them: In a change of policy for the spring semester, the university was requiring that anyone seeking assistance for learning disabilities submit by Jan. 8 a diagnostic evaluation less than three years old.

"I was outraged," said Mr. Freedman, whose assistance includes a note-taker in class, double time on tests and the option of taking exams in a separate room. "I was born with these disabilities, I'll die with them, and it's inane and unnecessary to ask us to go out and spend a thousand dollars to be re-evaluated. They're not asking blind and deaf students to get recertification that they still can't see or hear. It feels like they're trying to make us uncomfortable because they don't believe learning disabilities are real."

What is happening at Boston University reflects a broader debate being played out nationwide, as colleges and universities grapple with the growing population of students with learning disabilities. In a 1994 survey by the American Council on Education, 3 percent of full-time college freshmen identified themselves as learning disabled. Learning disabilities are the unexpected failure to learn, despite adequate intelligence, motivation and instruction; reading disorders like dyslexia are the most common.

"There certainly are some genuine learning disabilities," said Jon Westling, Boston University's provost and president-designate, who is responsible for the revised policy. "I can say with certainty that we will continue to welcome, and provide services for, those with genuine disabilities. But the system for granting accommodations was being abused. It's difficult for me to imagine why we would exempt a liberal arts student from our foreign language requirement, once this university has decided that foreign language proficiency is a necessary part of a liberal arts education."

A Rise in Students, And Colleges React

Federal law requires educational institutions to make whatever "reasonable accommodations" necessary to allow those with disabilities to learn on an equal basis with other students. Boston University has been a leader in the field, allowing accommodations like extra time on exams or waivers of the foreign language requirement, and also offering weekly tutoring and a summer program to help the learning disabled adjust to college work.

Mr. Westling expressed concern, however, that the Federal law was being used to undermine Boston's academic standards.

While there has been increasing concern that learning disabilities may be overdiagnosed in youngsters -- in Massachusetts, 17 percent of schoolchildren are deemed learning disabled -- the debate is only now expanding to higher education, where administrators have less experience and less legal guidance in dealing with them.

"We are just now beginning to see the large numbers of children who were diagnosed with learning disabilities in the 1980's moving into college," Mr. Westling said.

Until the university's change in policy, most students with learning disabilities would come to Dr. Brinckerhoff's office with a diagnostic report, a description of the academic accommodations they had previously received and what they and the diagnostician thought would be helpful. Dr. Brinckerhoff said that while he generally accepted the diagnoses, he did not always approve the requested accommodations, sometimes instead helping the student work on a needed skill.

Dr. Brinckerhoff resigned in late January, citing philosophical differences with the administration.

After Boston changed its policy, several students said they would file complaints with the Federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which is responsible for insuring that universities do not discriminate against the disabled.

"Boston University has been the flagship program in the country," said Louise Russell, director of the Student Disability Resource Center at Harvard University. "I worry about what this will do to all the schools that looked to them as the model. There is a backlash now."

Robert Shaw, the dean responsible for helping learning-disabled students at Brown University, said that as the number of students seeking assistance for learning disabilities had grown, so had Brown's scrutiny of their requests.

"Ten years ago, there were six people on my list," Dean Shaw said. "Now I've got 175 undergraduates and 25 graduate students, enough so almost every professor runs into it. When the cost goes up, not just financially but in the time it takes faculty, there is a swing in the pendulum.

"A lot of schools, including Brown, are asking what's really helpful to students, what do we really need to do?"

Defining Disability In the Classroom

Boston University's requirement for a re-evaluation goes further. Mr. Westling is skeptical about the very existence of some learning disabilities, questioning the whole concept, for example, of dysrationalia, the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence.

"This is an area with real academic implications," he said. "It is part of a broader cultural phenomenon. If you find something very difficult or frustrating, our culture has a penchant for describing that as a disability."

Other disabilities, Mr. Westling said, are developmental disorders that can be outgrown or overcome and should be regularly evaluated. While the law requires that youngsters be re-evaluated every three years, universities have always accepted that older students with learning disabilities will have them throughout their higher education.

Mr. Westling, a former Rhodes Scholar, now reviews the diagnostic reports and aid requests that were Dr. Brinckerhoff's domain. Of the first 28 requests under the new system, he rejected 27, mostly, he said, because of poor documentation.

Many of the 480 students who received the December letter said that they had been repeatedly evaluated since grade school with consistent results and that they could not believe that the university would try to take away the aid they depended on.

"I was diagnosed with dyslexia in second grade, and last evaluated five years ago," said a sophomore who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals. "When I got a letter saying my accommodations were being revoked, I was shocked and upset. I tried to talk to the administration, but they said they had to protect academic standards."

Mr. Westling said his action was prompted by faculty members' complaints that they had been asked for help they considered inappropriate. He came to question the role of the Learning Disability Support Services office, he added, only after he read dozens of diagnostic evaluations, many of which he considered semiliterate, vague, or written by people with little apparent expertise, and compared them with the accommodations the university granted. The aid sometimes went beyond what was recommended, he said.

He was also troubled, Mr. Westling said, that 40 percent of the students using the office had their disability diagnosed in college. But experts say that students use new and different skills in college, so that they often discover learning disabilities at that stage. At Harvard, for example, 25 percent of those with learning disabilities had their disability diagnosed in college.

In an interview, Mr. Westling declined to discuss specific cases. But in a speech last summer, he described a student who approached him after a freshman class with a letter from the support services office, explaining that she had a learning disabilities "in the area of auditory processing" and would need copies of lecture notes, a seat at the front of the class, extra time on exams and a separate room in which to take them. And, he said, he was told that Samantha might fall asleep in class, so he should fill her in on any material she missed.

Dr. Brinckerhoff said that while he might give a student a letter supporting the other aid, he would never consider napping in class an accommodation to a learning disability.

A Strong Protest From a Benefactor

Mr. Westling's attitude toward learning disabilities, and the Dec. 4 letter to students , came as a particular blow to Anne Schneider, a New York City alumna whose daughter, Andrea, is in graduate school at Boston University. When Andrea was an undergraduate, struggling with learning disabilities, Mrs. Schneider helped create the Learning Disabilities Support Services office, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for it and serving, until Mr. Westling recently declared the office defunct, as chairwoman of the advisory board that helped guide it.

"That letter was like declaring war on these kids, right at exam time," Mrs. Schneider said. "Boston University is no longer a safe place for students with learning disabilities. I know of no expert in the field who thinks college students' learning disabilities change dramatically after high school age, that you should re-test to see if they've gone away. And forget about getting an appointment with a neuropsychologist in late December, and having a report by Jan. 8. It was ridiculous."

Soon after Mrs. Schneider's protest, the students received a letter from the university giving them until August to document their disabilities and apologizing "for any inconvenience caused by the timing" of the original letter.

While the date was changed, Mr. Westling's intention was not. In a Jan. 11 letter, the provost wrote to Mrs. Schneider, "In recent years, Learning Disability Support Services at Boston University and programs like it elsewhere have all too often reinforced disabilities and encouraged dependency."

Two weeks later, Dr. Brinckerhoff resigned, as did Kip Opperman, the director of disability services over all at the university.

"I'm still shocked that this has happened and that it has happened to me," Dr. Brinckerhoff said. "If it can happen to someone who wrote a book on higher education and learning disabilities, it's a message to everyone in the field."

Mr. Westling said the learning-disability office would continue, perhaps expanding so that the university itself could diagnose learning disabilities. The university's actions, he emphasized, would be based on careful scientific research, which he said was scarce in that field.

"The vast majority doesn't meet basic standards of scholarship," he said. "While it is clear that there are some genuine learning disabilities, in particular reading disabilities, there is deep skepticism in well-informed quarters about the breadth of the epidemiology. Some of these disabilities are very poorly defined."

Many experts in the field say that while Mr. Westling's assessment might have been fair a decade ago, there was now a substantial body of solid research.

"It's so unfortunate that people may not understand how much we now know, especially in the field of reading disorders, which are 85 percent of all learning disabilities," said Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a pediatrician at the Yale University School of Medicine. "We have the model, empirically validated, to tell us about the disorder at the same level that we understand hypertension or renal disease. We are identifying more learning disabled students, but that's not a reason to cut services. We don't say, 'There's too many deaf people, let's cut back on hearing aids.' "

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